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Friday, September 12, 2008

Canning Time!!!

Sustain me with cakes of raisins, Refresh me with apples,

Song of Solomon 2:5

Lexi left yesterday afternoon with Na-naw (our grandma) to go for her birthday shopping, dinner and sleep-over. She got some sparkly pink tennis shoes and stayed up until 11:30. On Wednesday night our friend, Ms. Miller,dropped off some things in our car. Alexis received lots of candy and a pretty necklace - Caleb, a ball and bat along with candy. (Thanks Ms. Miller, Ashlee & Sam!) Na-naw brought Lexi back this morning just in time for Balancing the Sword (balancingthesword.com).

Back to canning!

After they left yesterday afternoon (around 3:30) we all started canning. I (Kimber) did the greenbeans by myself for the first time with some instruction/overseeing by mommy! Everyone else pitched in with our HUGE bucket of apples. We got the apples from the lady who also provided us with all those pears.

The Apples.

It doesn't look like much from the picture - but it was a lot! We did about 3/4 of it. "Did" meaning peeling, soaking (in lemon juice for color), coring and cutting. After we did all that we had to put 2 of our big stock pots, full of apples, on our stove (let's just say the pots were a little big). After they cooked down enough to puree, daddy "went to town" and took out our potato masher and started mashing. We had previously pureed in our blender but it's not supposed to hold hot liquids so that didn't work out. Well, the potato masher didn't get all the bumps out so we did one stock pot full of apples pureed in a blender and the other by hand with a potato masher (an electric one). The pureed batch is really smooth and a lot thinner than the hand-mashed one. I had some applesauce (that's what we were making) this morning and it was really good! Now for the pictures!

Everyone in operation.

Daddy and Caleb peeled, Mommy cut and Seth worked the CD player (we listened to Alexis' Jonathan Park Audio Series that she got for her birthday). Josiah (that light yellow head by daddy) rolled the apples in lemon juice. After I finished the greenbeans I quartered the apples and cored a little bit. Hannah mixed in, helping wherever needed. She was also taking care of Lydia and making dinner.

Our peelers!

Cutting up the apples.

This is daddy hand-mashing the apples. His hand got really tired!

The finished product! Well, half. Altogether there are 14 quarts of applesauce, 12, 1/4 pints of applesauce (for Lydia) and 7 quarts of greenbeans! (Seth took this picture this afternoon)

After dinner we started finishing up our canning jobs. It took 'till around 9:30 before we were close to completely done. Everything was probably cooked, canned and cleaned-up around 9:40. It was a full night! The canning isn't very hard (I think it's pretty fun!) but the preparing the food is a little time-consuming and a great example of how to learn patience and willingness to help!